In Japanese culture, gates symbolize separation between sacred and profane, the beginning of a new space while paying tribute to the place you were in before you move into the new. Gates are shorthand for possibility.
I picture a gate as a thin, sometimes ornately decorated low piece of furniture. It may be beautiful in its decoration, but it is also deeply functional. I think this gate—the swinging gate—will have some slats for the open air to move through. And it would be made of natural materials, knowing your connection to living sustainable lives. And it would be a low gate, so that we can welcome people into our community. We don’t want it as high as a fence, like the fence in the children’s story. That fence kept people out—we want to welcome people in.
We need our spaces to reflect that movement in our lives from one place to another. A gate symbolizes possibility. We are moving from one to another, there is the possibility of transformation.
Many times gates are made with natural products—wood, a little metal. My parents have a gate around their house—I like to tease them and call the house their gated community.
(Pause)
It’s true though. Their home, maybe like your home, is a sanctuary. It is where they go to rest. It is where they prepare to be different people than who they are in their public lives. The distinction a gate provides between one space and another calls to mind the many different kinds of spaces we exist in—sacred spaces, everyday spaces, and the transition times inbetween.
It seems that we are on the cusp of transition. You are looking for someone to practice ministry with you, someone who will hold the stories of the congregation and care for you while they are present.
Ministry is like the gate. Ministry is a form of possibility.
Ministry challenges us to be the best people we can be. Like Robert Bly says in his poem, we are on the cusp of Sunday night. What call will we have answered by then? What have we identified as so precious that we must call out, call out, call out to answer?
Ministry calls us to challenge ourselves and also to provide comfort. It asks us to hold joy and sorrow, confusion and clarity, love and disillusionment, with both hands, eagerly, knowing that we will be changed in the process.
Ministry is a process of transformation. It calls us to reach down into our inner depths and examine, with our heads, hearts and bodies, the ultimate questions.
Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?
Will there be anyone else on the journey with me?
It provides the space to come up with some working answers. Ministry holds the inbetween space for us, so that we can acknowledge the difference between the people we are now, with all of our foibles and faults, and the people we aspire to be, the highest ideals and principles we look to as models.
Ministry is about holding that gate open, and reminding people we have the responsibility to hold them open for each other. It is also about closing the gate—creating a gated community—when it’s time for us to hold each other in times of need.
It is about acknowledging the wells of loneliness people carry with them. For all of our attempts to put ministry in little boxes, it doesn’t work. Ministry is bigger than boxes. It needs that open air, that sense of being inbetween, standing like a gate recognizing both the old space and the new, so that it can grow.
There are so many different forms of ministry. Having had Claire Butterfield here, as your regular visiting minister, I know you are familiar with community ministers, people who do the work of the church outside of church walls. She is an example of a minister who brings an answer to Robert Bly’s call.
Community ministry is ministry that is traditionally done outside of church walls.
A parish minister would help you focus your mission and vision so that that gate really does swing—it swings open and shut—keeping our understanding of ourselves open to transformation. A minister cares for you and challenges you, keeps that vision of who we are next to that picture of who we want to be.
Robert Collyer, the first minister of my home church, was one of those ministers who could keep both pictures of possibility in his hands. He brought his community ministry into the church, throwing open that gate, keeping it open for the people who need it.
Robert’s life started out in England, where he was a blacksmith. I imagine he made a gate or two in his time. He was married, and when his wife gave birth to their second child, she died unexpectedly.
Robert was devastated.
The feeling that lifted him out of his grief and loneliness was a call to ministry.
He began preaching—he was a Methodist—and he preached all over, anywhere he could get a pulpit.
Over time, he felt out of touch with Methodist dogma.
In fact, his heretical feelings drove him to give up his preaching license.
He began readings—he was an avid reader, something I share with Robert, and he learned about Unitarianism. He finally found a home in a faith. Or rather, he found a name for what he had been preaching for all this time.
Robert fell in love again, and immigrated to America. He took up the same pattern here as he had in England—blacksmithing during the week, and preaching on weekends. He moved to Chicago and preached there.
The first Unitarian Church of Chicago took notice of this preacher and hired him to be the “minister at large” which meant he did the work of the church outside of its walls. He was their social worker as well, providing schooling, board and housing to the imprisoned, destitute children, publicans, and harlots of Chicago.
He was a busy man when Unity Church of Chicago, now known as Second Unitarian Church, was started. This church asked him to be their minister while they looked for a permanent one, but quickly, he became the one they wanted to keep.
He had to consider a new gate. A new possibility. A new form of ministry, moving from community to parish ministry. Robert chose to keep both forms of ministry; he moved his community ministry into his parish, and continued changing lives. He started a day care for children. He railed against the evils of slavery, both from the pulpit and as a part of the US Sanitary Commission. He preached in order to help the troops during the Civil War. He continued having schools for children while becoming the Midwest Preacher.
Choice has always been a theme in Unitarian Universalism. Ministry will always offer churches choices about who they minister to, and how they expand their ministry. It is a gate of transformation, and a gate of including others. Ministers hold the elements of choice when helping congregations grow. They look beyond the traditional and move forward, holding the freedom to choose and the responsibility of the choice’s consequences together.
The gate of possibility, of ministry, has those two elements, freedom and responsibility. You have the freedom to pick a good minister. And the responsibility of finding the best fit for your congregation.
We stand in the gateway of a global form of church, creating an opportunity to bring all of us inside and remind us of our duty and our joy to the people outside.
Ultimately, when you make this choice, to pick the choice where your soul will be fed, is a hard choice. It means there’s some work involved, some intention about who you want to be—this is the part where you look over the gate, at the people you aspire to be, knowing that you are the people you are right now. It means walking through that gate and being willing to be transformed.
Ministry is all about learning about yourself—learning who you are, and who you want to be, and where you can do the work you think you are supposed to be doing. Ministry is both a “supposed to” and an “I want to.”
Ministry is living in the middle of the gate, living from love instead of fear or indifference.
My experiences as a hospital chaplain challenged me to walk through that gate every time I walked through a hospital room. There’s a lot of tension on that threshold—I never know what’s going on in a hospital room.
I’ve found that yet another crucial piece of this transformational work is listening. And when I’ve been in the hospital, I do a lot of listening. To families, to patients, to the staff who work with them. What they’ve taught me is that the process of listening and telling our stories is what keeps us able to straddle both sides of that gate—both sides of who we are, and who we want to be.
Being a hospital chaplain allows me to listen and to talk with people at some of the most crucial moments of their lives—when illness or trauma intersects with everyday life. Parish ministry allows for those conversations as well, but the intensity of the hospital experience makes those stories come to the surface faster.
We human beings are natural meaning makers, and the stories we tell and listen to are the stories that form our theologies, our histories, and ultimately the answers to those questions—-
Who are we? Why are we here? Will there be anyone on the journey with me?
A couple of weeks ago, I sat with a patient’s daughter who was struggling with some of those questions. We were in the critical care unit, which means the patient had a tube down her throat to help her breathe. I’ll call her daughter Sarah.
Sarah is in her sixties, and she’s been taking care of her mother for a while. She and I talked about a lot of things—her mother’s care, what the outcomes will be, whether or not Sarah was able and comfortable to follow her mother’s wishes.
She clutched a Kleenex in one hand and her cell phone in another.
She was clear with me—she did not want her mother to suffer, and if and when she was called on to make a certain decision, her tone was calm, not resigned or sad.
Our conversation turned to Sarah’s religious past. She told me several stories of her religious upbringing—each one marked by someone in religious authority refusing to allow Sarah her questions about religion, God, and Sarah’s place in the world.
I wanted to hand Sarah a piece of paper with our web address on it. I wanted to say, “Sarah, there’s a place out there for you. There are other people like you out there.”
But that was not what Sarah needed. She did not need practical solutions, as much as I love to hand them out and of course, rarely get to.
Sarah grew more and more agitated as she talked with me. It was clear that Sarah was standing in the middle of another gate— the between place where what you were taught and what you know to be true doesn’t make sense any more. I kept listening to Sarah. I wanted her to know that I cared about her story, that I cared what happened to her. I wanted, as theologian Nelle Morton says, “to hear her into speech,” to usher in a new kind of comfort—spiritual and religious comfort—for Sarah.
Sarah talked about ow hard it had been to get married in a church that didn’t let her question. After the ceremony, she didn’t go back to the church she grew up in.
However, during her life, she found she could not go to another church either—it didn’t feel right. She prays by herself and does feel connected to the other communities in her life, but there is a bit But in Sarah’s tone.
Here Sarah paused and looked at me.
I took her hand and said, ‘Sarah, there’s a poem I like—let me tell you the first three lines.’
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to crawl on your knewws for a hundred miles, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
I told Sarah she was just fine the way she was—that I liked her just the way she was.
And Sarah began to cry. I held her hand for a while. Sarah’s story is not unusual. The gate between who we are and who we want to be sometimes is filled with great loneliness and great pain. Many people I know have those moments like Sarah where the discrepancy between the way they live their life and what they are taught becomes too evident to bear, alone, and they have to cross that gate, and tell their story.
Being heard helps all people change the way they carry their stress in their bodies. Sarah’s body slumped when she finished. She had been carrying these stories around, and had probably told them before—but had not been listened to in a way that reflected her pain.
The pain we carry is part of our lives. It becomes too big when we have too many expectations for ourselves. When we hold it better, when we minister to each other, when we listen, we are really able to be who we are. It means we don’t spend too much time looking over the gate about who we want to be—we spend a balanced amount of time straddling that gate. We need to have that balance—that balance between who we are and who we want to be.
As we minister to each other, as we find out our ministries in this world, we can listen and share our stories. We can care for each other when we fall short, and we can dream big together.
This is the ministry I believe is possible for this congregation, the ministry I dream we will create together in the days to come. Let this ministry begin.
Rev. Elizabeth Harding 